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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/27432556">Interlude: Lightning</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/apropensityforcharm/pseuds/apropensityforcharm'>apropensityforcharm</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Original Work</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Angst, Gen, Missing Scene, Salty Nein Campaign, dnd campaign, navel gazing</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-11-07</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-11-07</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-07 01:02:44</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Teen And Up Audiences</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>No Archive Warnings Apply</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>1,790</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/27432556</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/apropensityforcharm/pseuds/apropensityforcharm</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>The lost fight with Kriv gets Shell thinking.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>2</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>2</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Collections:</b></td><td>Salty Nein Fics</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>Interlude: Lightning</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>
  <span>There is a moment when the city is heavy with sleep and the stars are bright like specks of white paint across the midnight sky, and Shell has an idea.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>She’s sitting on the edge of the rooftop of the inn. Her legs hang over the edge and swing against the brick wall, her back hunched a little and her hands clasped between her knees. She has a view over the low rooftops of Jorah from this vantage point, all the way across to where she can see the moonlight glinting off the distant waters of the harbour. There’s a gargoyle perched on the lip of a building twenty feet away, the moonlight silhouetting it’s menacing pose and its bat-like wings. With her own set of wings and her gloomy mood bowing down on her back, she feels rather like its pair.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>It’s late, and she left the party downstairs not too long ago, licking their wounds or glorying in their victories. They’re probably asleep by now. She’s pretty sure she heard Wynn start snoring a little while back. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>There’s a storm off at sea. It’s a long way away, the angry clouds invisible in the night but for the moments they bluster across the moon’s face, the shadow of a creature passing through. But Shell can see the lightning, faint streaks of brilliance turning the sky violet and white and blue for a half of a second, a brief flash of illumination before they’re gone. It’s quite beautiful, like some dramatic display of theatre playing out too far away for her to join the audience.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>It’s been a long day, a </span>
  <em>
    <span>hard </span>
  </em>
  <span>day, which is just a day like all the others recently, and her body feels heavy and lethargic, as if someone has stripped the marrow from her bones and replaced it all with sand. It’s unbelievable that only this morning she’d spoken with Birdie about her plans - </span>
  <em>
    <span>their </span>
  </em>
  <span>plans, is that was this is now? She’s still not sure, not sure she wants to be sure - and then they’d </span>
  <em>
    <span>spoken </span>
  </em>
  <span>with the King, and the strange Arcanist with all that immense power had been there, and she’d promised her tutelage, and then… Surely that couldn’t have been just this morning. Maybe Kriv whacked her over the head with his big spiky tail. She’s gone a bit loopy.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Perhaps that’s why she has an idea. A spark in her brain, electrical like the lightning on the horizon.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>The lightning, it’s - it’s - it’s dangerous. She thinks the heaviness of her body must be an aftereffect of the spell Kriv threw at her. The current had ravaged her body and stolen all her energy with it. She feels anchored to the rooftop, as bound to earth as the stone gargoyle gazing at her from across the street. She’s used to feeling light as a bird; sometimes she thinks her bones might be hollow too. The heaviness feels foreign and </span>
  <em>
    <span>wrong.</span>
  </em>
</p><p>
  <span>There’s another flash of lightning, just barely visible cresting the ocean top. The storm is too far away to hear the thunder - thunder like what Azure makes, deep and rumbling and shaking the ground - but it’s bright. Like a little pocket of daylight far off the coastline.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>The lightning had </span>
  <em>
    <span>hurt, </span>
  </em>
  <span>more than she’d thought anything could hurt. White hot, the sort of heat which confuses the body, </span>
  <em>
    <span>burning </span>
  </em>
  <span>cold. It had lanced through her, only present for a fraction of a second before it retreated, but it doesn’t </span>
  <em>
    <span>feel </span>
  </em>
  <span>gone. It feels like it’s lingering and hiding in the shadows of her mind. </span>
  <em>
    <span>God, </span>
  </em>
  <span>she has a headache. She isn’t even making sense to herself. It’s not the sort of pain that the body is built to comprehend. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>But despite that. Despite it all. She wonders if she could replicate that pain in someone else.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>The thought of it makes her feel somewhat ill, her stomach turning uneasily, but the raw power of it calls to her. And she knows she’s not the most worldly or wise, but she has an </span>
  <em>
    <span>idea.</span>
  </em>
  
</p><p>
  <span>She’s not naive, or at least she’s </span>
  <em>
    <span>trying </span>
  </em>
  <span>not to be, and she can’t be the only one to have noticed a pattern in the last few weeks. Maybe it’s just who they </span>
  <em>
    <span>are </span>
  </em>
  <span>as people which attracts the chaos, maybe it’s fate, but she’d never foreseen her life turning in this direction when she’d taken her first steps outside of the village. Dangerous, yes, but not - not like </span>
  <em>
    <span>this. </span>
  </em>
  <span>Back home she’d never used her magic to hurt a damn thing, no matter how often she fantasised about it. Now? She thinks of that woman lying unmoving in the dirt by the river, her head half submerged in the dark water and the river current tugging gleefully at her fallen fingers. </span>
</p><p>
  <span> Her jaw clenches against the acidic taste rising in her throat. She remembers Jacint’s gentle reassurance in the aftermath, and knows she needs to be </span>
  <em>
    <span>prepared.</span>
  </em>
</p><p>
  <span>She looks at the gargoyle across from her. She extends her hand, and she casts Witchbolt. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>The lightning streaks from the centre of her palm, an ugly unnatural colour, rusted red and sparking off flakes like old dried blood. It strikes the gargoyle and a web of cracks explodes outward from the centre of impact. The gargoyle shatters with a loud crack that splits the silence, crumbling to the rooftop. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>Shell closes her fist, breathing hard. The red lightning dies with a hiss, and the only thing left behind is the faint smoldering of the blasted stone, paired with the distinct smell of ozone.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Those spectral lights from Sehanine’s temple. Her memory of that whole event is hazy, scrubbed from her mind but for the barest details, but they’d used lightning too. A different kind of lightning, sparky and scattered, like the most painful conception of a sparkler imaginable. She raises her hand to trace along the pale scar which stretches over her collarbone and along her throat, almost beautiful in its intricacy. She breathes in, and out.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Her tail taps against the rooftop tiles as she thinks. Over the ocean, the storm flashes.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>The Witchbolt had interacted with her Shield in an interesting way. It had struck the barrier and </span>
  <em>
    <span>spread</span>
  </em>
  <span>, delicate offshoots skittering up and over her head, almost like a living creature looking for a target. Or perhaps like branches made of fire and electricity, blinding in their intensity. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>She wonders if she could bend the mind of the lightning to her will. Refine it, control it. Direct it.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>There are fragments of glass caught in the gutter of the rooftop just a little way away and Shell cocks her head as they catch her eye, drawing a lip between her fangs. Brint told a story on the way to Jorah she remembers, some fantastical sailing trip that she doesn’t know whether to believe, but he’d mentioned glass, </span>
  <em>
    <span>petrified </span>
  </em>
  <span>glass he’d called it, that he’d found on a remote beach off the coast of Constella. It had been lightning which had done it, he’d said. Lightning so hot it melted the sands of the beach to glass. She’d been enraptured listening to him, completely unable to understand the </span>
  <em>
    <span>scale </span>
  </em>
  <span> of heat and energy it must have taken to produce that effect.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Her wing extends to its full extent and she uses it to clumsily scrape a puddle of the glass to within arm’s reach. She picks up the largest shard and holds it in front of her face, watching the way the surface distorts the occasional flashes of light from the harbour. It’s about the size of her palm, smooth and slick and jagged at the edges.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>She thinks of the Witchbolt spell and raises one clawed finger to press against the flat side of the glass. The image of Kriv pops into her mind, his face creased in frustration as he’d </span>
  <em>
    <span>hurled </span>
  </em>
  <span>the spell at her with as much force as possible. She thinks of the unguarded frustration in his body and his face, and she aims for the opposite. Her brow furrows in concentration and she pictures precision and control and cool, collected focus. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>It takes a moment. Long enough that she waits with held breath for one, two, ten seconds, and her heart sinks because she must have failed, misunderstood, </span>
  <em>
    <span>again</span>
  </em>
  <span>, except - there!</span>
</p><p>
  <span>She </span>
  <em>
    <span>feels </span>
  </em>
  <span>the little spark of energy more than she sees it, leaping from her finger into the glass, and it’s only another second before she spots the little wavering light hiding inside the glass. Her breath catches and the sudden excitement jams her throat. The light snuffs out as her concentration breaks.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>She wrinkles her nose and tries again. She coaxes the tiny spark of electricity back into the glass shard and slowly, </span>
  <em>
    <span>carefully </span>
  </em>
  <span>drags her finger across its surface. The little spark follows her finger, a line of electricity growing in its wake, and her heart leaps with elation. Her fangs dig into her lower lip to hold back an excited squeak.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>The miniature streak of electricity grows and splits into two beams, then three, then more until she holds in her palm a tiny ecosystem of electricity, dancing beneath the surface of the broken piece of glass. The tip of her finger tingles, but it doesn’t hurt. She watches it, eyes wide, and she thinks she might be able to </span>
  <em>
    <span>do </span>
  </em>
  <span>something with this.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>But she’s </span>
  <em>
    <span>tired </span>
  </em>
  <span>is the thing, and she can only keep her light show going for a minute before even that becomes too much for her and the lightning flickers and fades. The glass left behind is slightly scorched, streaks of black mottling the surface. She thinks it looks cool. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>Azure and Birdie are sleeping in the room just below her as she drops back down through the open window. Her wing catches on one of the pulleys and she swears, then freezes to see if she woke anyone. It remains quiet so after a moment or two she creeps forward, grumbling under her breath as she makes her way to her bed. She steps carefully over Birdie’s prone body on the floor and flops gracelessly onto her bed, face first, the piece of glass tucked securely in her pocket and her riverstone in the other.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>It’s only a matter of moments before Shell’s asleep, as her mind can finally no longer outrun the exhaustion of her body. For once, her dreams aren’t shadowed by memories of the will-o-wisps, or the woman at the river, or anything that came earlier. Instead, the storm rages silently out at sea and she dreams of lightning that dances across her eyelids. She reaches out to it as it beckons to her. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>And she thinks she might be able to do something with this idea of hers. </span>
</p>
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